Kevin Smith Thinks Alpha Flight Should Be The Next Boundary-Pushing Superhero Movie

Films like Wonder Woman and Black Panther have helped push the superhero genre to new places, and Kevin Smith thinks Alpha Flight could be the next boundary-pushing team.

Smith and Marc Bernardin recently did a live Q&A for their Fat Man on Batman podcast, and during the session, a fan asked what they thought could be another one of those boundary-pushing films. For Smith, it came down to fan favorite team Alpha Flight.

"I might go safe and go with Alpha Flight," Smith said to big applause. "No. 1 it's Canadian so of course that plays well up here, but I wasn't going for like 'Canadian diversity', I was going for, Northstar is the first openly gay comic book character so that might be a way to kind of push the line a little bit, and you know you're not going "come see the movie about the gay superhero all by himself'. He's in a team ya know, so then maybe it goes down a little smoother and I didn't mean that in a dirty way."

"For those at home who are like 'I don't like my superheroes gay' and then you give them a f****** team picture and the one character's gay and then they walk out of the movie going 'I love gay superheroes, more!' That's my dream," Smith said.

It also doesn't hurt that Alpha Flight in recent years has been involved with Captain Marvel, giving you the perfect vehicle to introduce them and build a movie off that foundation.

As for Bernardin, he had two picks. "Shang-Chi from Marvel," Bernardin said. "To do an Asian superhero. To both play into and subvert the already existent sort of tropes and stereotypes that exist on the page, but to make them real. Make these characters real and make them deep and absolute play to that audience which is historically underserved, especially in America."

His second pick would play to a different audience and would be from the DC side of things. "Or Blue Beetle, Jaime Reyes," Bernardin said. "The Keith Giffen version. Because again, America in about 20 years is going to be more Hispanic than any other sort of class of people, and there's never been, there are rarely movies targeting that demographic audience."

In each of those three cases, a new audience and segment of people could be brought into the superhero genre in a way they've never had the opportunity for before, and at the end of the day, that's a win-win for fans and for the genre itself.